Nov
28
Why is it so Dark in Here?
November 28, 2005 | Leave a Comment
A. N. Wilson (”Ann” to “his” friends), a writer of no mean talent, managed to write the meanest–and most inept–biography of C. S. Lewis to date. That should come as no surprise to readers of the absolutely awful Jesus, the insipid Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, or the unintentionally hilarious Hilaire Belloc. He tries desperately to be witty, clever, erudite, but succeeds only in being banal. Indeed, the man is a veritable volcano of banality in the dismal Jesus, where he is mostly making it all up as he goes along, depending as he does on the credulity of an age in which The Da Vinci Code is a best seller and there are still folks about who think that the earth is only 6000 years old. That particular “dating” of earth’s origins is actually an Anglican contribution, and it is probably no coincidence that Wilson once contemplated ministry in the Anglican Church. He’d be a perfect fit these days, at least in some parts of the ECUSA. If ever there were living proof of the fact that clever prose does not always entail a clever mind, Andrew Norman Wilson is it.
The tactic that he tends to employ in order to pass himself off as intelligent is the use of psychological analysis as biographical sketch. Some of his claims approach the Freudian in their paranoia about people’s motivations–things about which it is impossible to have any kind of empirical evidence. But who needs evidence when you have innuendo? Wilson’s attention to evidentiary detail is best illustrated by the tirade he threw in 1987 when he complained that there was no statue of Matthew Arnold in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Bitter complaints were sent to the Dean of the Abbey, who calmly pointed out that there had been a bust of Matthew Arnold at the Abbey since 1891. Oops.
Readers of the Lewis biography will be all too familiar with this pattern. Wilson is a man who clearly has, as they say, “issues”–issues about women, issues about religion, issues about folks who are better writers or scholars than he is. You don’t have to be a Lewis fanatic (and I am not one) to find his far fetched speculation about Lewis tiresome in the extreme, or to be more than a little annoyed by his cavalier attitude towards those pesky little things called “facts”. Imagine thinking that it would be either interesting or relevant to report upon a conversation between Lewis and a student that occured while the two of them were standing at a urinal. Or better yet: imagine thinking that anyone could have anything to say about such a conversation other than Lewis or that student. Where was Ann during this conversation? Hiding in a stall? Better not to think about that.
Not too long ago I read a review that Wilson wrote of Walter Hooper’s edition of Lewis’ letters of 1931-1949, written for the Times Literary Supplement (7 May 2004, p. 13). It was more of the same. Passages from Lewis’ letters were taken out of context and interpreted in the most fantastic ways imaginable, making Lewis into a coarse, misogynistic frat boy. He closes his essay by saying
Having myself written a biography of Lewis, I should say that his letters actually reflect his personality pretty clearly and recall for me why, of all such tasks I have undertaken, I found writing the story of C. S. Lewis the least agreeable.
One wonders what to make of the claim that the letters “actually” reflect Lewis’ personality. Ordinarily, the letters would themselves have been a source of information about that personality, but Wilson seems to think that he’s already got a good enough grip on Lewis from other sources, sources with which Lewis’s own words appear to him to be in agreement. But of course Wilson was clever enough to anticipate this worry–early on in the essay he writes that “There is a great self-consciousness about the letters” and drops enough other hints that he thinks these letters were written from the start for posthumous publication. So forget about trusting them as reliable sources for Lewis’s inmost thoughts. It’s so much more fun to interpret them the way Straussian scholars interpret Plato–the most meaningful things are the things that are not said explicitly: women are gross, modernism is evil and dangerous, Lewis was a jerk about the few women that he did know, etc.
If we were to play Wilson’s own game, we would wonder where all this hostility comes from–not just the hostility to Lewis, but to religion and its adherents generally. Perhaps if Wilson had waited until late 2003 he would have been more encouraged to remain in the Church, but I suspect that his reasons for departing go, er, deeper. I’m not as fluent as he in the argot of psychobabble, but one cannot help but be reminded of that scene in The Last Battle in which the non-believers are left stranded in the little shed, unable to see anyone or anything, and unable to understand the words spoken to them by the believers or by Aslan. The unbelievers are more than isolated in the dark–they are also remarkably grumpy. Rather like A. N. Wilson. He just has a better sense of humor than they do. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have his head up his ass.
